1

This is a pre-print version of the chapter: Jensenius, A. R. (2017). Exploring music-related

micromotion. In C. Wöllner (Ed.), Body, Sound and Space in Music and Beyond: Multimodal

Explorations (pp. 29--48). Oxon: Routledge.

Chapter 3

Exploring music-related micromotion

Alexander Refsum Jensenius

University of Oslo, Department of Musicology

As living human beings we are constantly in motion. Even when we try to stand absolutely still, our

breathing, pulse and postural adjustments lead to motion at the micro-level. Such micromotion is

small, but it is still possible to experience it in the body and it is also visible to others. This chapter

reflects on such (un)conscious and (in)voluntary micromotion observed and experienced when one

attempts to stand physically still, and how musical sound influences such micromotion.

The theoretical starting point of this chapter is that of embodied music cognition (Leman, 2008; see

Leman et al., this volume), and the acknowledgement of a close relationship between body motion

and musical sound in both the performance and the perception of music (Godøy & Leman, 2010).

The last decades have seen a growing interest in the study of what will be referred to as ‘music-

related body motion’ – that is, any type of human motion carried out in a musical context. This term

is used here to include the motion of both performers and perceivers, hence covering a broad range

of functional motion categories, such as sound-producing, sound-modifying, sound-accompanying

and communicative (see Jensenius et al., 2010, for an overview of different types of music-related

body motion).

Most studies of music-related body motion, such as summarised in (Wanderley & Battier, 2000;

Gritten & King, 2006, 2011; Godoy & Leman, 2010), have focused on fairly large-scale motion.

Particularly, the many studies of different types of communicative ‘gestures’ in the performance and

perception of music, focus on what could be referred to as meso level (at a centimetre-scale) or even

macro level (at a metre-scale) actions. Such meso or macro level perspectives are prevalent also in

the study of gestures in linguistics and psychology (Kendon, 2004; McNeill, 2005; Goldin-Meadow,

2003). This chapter, on the other hand, focuses on music-related micromotion, the smallest

controllable and perceivable human actions, typically happening at a millimetre-scale (or smaller).

The empirical starting point of the chapter is data gathered during three phases of the artistic-

scientific research project Sverm. The Norwegian word ‘sverm’ is quite similar to the English word

‘swarm’, and was chosen to symbolise the ‘flocking’ of markers observed in the motion capture

recordings of the pilot study. In such recordings, the markers attached to the body of the people

being studied move in a semi-random order, yet with a clear directionality as a group. Hence the

‘swarm’ may be seen as an abstraction of all the tiny actions happening in our bodies at all times.

The Sverm project was a two-year-long exploration of physical standstill carried out with a group of

professional artists, including composer-musicians, choreographer-dancers and a scenographer. The

project culminated in a series of music/dance performances, entirely built up of micromotion and

microsound. As it turned out, the Sverm project also forked into some smaller scientific sub-projects

about human standstill, with the aim of answering the following questions:

1. How much do people move when standing still in silence?

2. Does the level of standstill change during the course of a standstill session?

3. Does the quantity and quality of standstill change with practice?

4. Does listening to music influence the level of standstill?

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The chapter starts with a survey of related literature, followed by findings from the different phases

of the Sverm project and a discussion of the elements of body, space and sound from a micromotion

perspective.

The micromotion of standstill

The term ‘standstill’ will be used in this chapter to denote the act of not moving. This term is not so

commonly used in the research literature on human body motion, so its usage deserves a brief

explanation. In the medical literature, such as in Mulholland (1995), the word ‘stillness’ is often used

to describe the act of standing still. Stillness, however, is clearly ambiguous in a musical context,

since the word does not differentiate between the act of standing physically still and that of being

silent – that is, making no sound. The same is the case for the term ‘quiet standing’, which is often

used in the biomechanics and physiotherapy literature (Winter, 1995). Other terms commonly found

in the research literature include ‘immobile’, ‘inactive’, ‘motionless’ and ‘stationary’. These terms,

however, suggest an inability to move, while we have focused on studying the motion of healthy

people that are trying to stand still. As such, the term ‘standstill’ seems appropriate, even though it

may give connotations to a traffic jam or a machine breakdown. It also effectively describes the

methodological approach that is used in the project: people standing still.

Observing people standing still on the floor is a novel method in music research, but it is an approach

commonly used in physiotherapy and biomechanics. In these fields the aim is to understand more

about the physical and/or cognitive health of the patients, by observing the unconscious and/or

involuntary micromotion of people’s standstill. In the Sverm project, however, the focus was on

using standstill as a method to uncover people's cognition of music, through their bodily behaviour.

Even though standstill may be new to music research, it is not new to music performance. Many

musicians use physical standstill to build expectation before or after playing. A famous example is

that of Michael Jackson’s epic opening of the 1993 Super Bowl half-time show, during which he

stood still in front of a cheering audience for 90 seconds. He brilliantly managed to build up a

heightened expectation among the thousands of people in the stadium and millions watching through

the TV screens, which was followed by a massive ‘release’ when the music began playing and he

began dancing and singing. The ‘lack’ of performance was also used in a very different, yet related,

concept in John Cage’s 4’3”. In performances of this piece the ‘absence’ of sound and motion of the

performer leads to a heightened awareness of all types of other sounds in the performance space

(Cage, 1961).

Standstill is also used in the visual arts, such as in the video works of Bill Viola (1995), who explore

time-stretching his videos to such an extent that they feel like still images, albeit their slowly moving

character. In dance performance, the Japanese Butoh tradition is famous for very slow motion

sequences (Kurihara, 2000). The duo Eiko and Koma, for example, have been carrying out

performances in which they have been standing, sitting or lying almost still for extended periods of

time (Yamada et al., 2000). One example is their 1998 performance installation Breathe in which

they lay naked still on the floor for several days. In the performance art project Being on the beach

the participants stood still together while perceiving their surroundings (Refsum & Rimestad, 2013).

Watching others stand still, or performing standstill one your own, is not interesting because of what

is not happening, but rather because of the micromotion that actually happens. As living organisms,

our bodies are constantly in motion, even when trying to be still. Most such micromotion is produced

unintentionally and is so small that it is barely visible at a distance. But the ‘invisibility’ of

micromotion does not mean that it does not affect us. Rather, nuance and expressivity in music may

to a great extent be conveyed and experienced through micromotion:

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As opposed to the external motor entrainment initiated by overt body motion, micro-

movement might be a natural manifestation of the internal motor engagement (Su &

Pöppel, 2012, p. 381).

While micromotion may have not received large-scale interest so far, there are several examples of

its investigation over the years. This includes the seminal work on ‘microexpressions’ by Ekman and

Friesen (1969), which focused on how facial micromotion reveal individuals’ feelings, and how this

can be used to determine when someone is lying. Similarly, research on micromotion of the eyes –

such as microsaccades, drifts and tremors – has shown that our eyes are always in motion (Martinez-

Conde & Macknik, 2007) and that microsaccades in particular are related to our mental

visualisations (Laeng & Teodorescu, 2002).

In biomechanics, standstill has been studied as an example of the ‘human pendulum’, since we tend

to sway in a semi-random pattern as adjustments take place throughout the body (Collins & De Luca,

1994). Many of these studies focus on explaining the biomechanical nature of the swaying by using

force plates to examine feet and leg activity (Winter et al., 1998; Loram & Lakie, 2002). There are

also examples of how chronobiologists study the temporal and rhythmic nature of human

micromotion, with a focus on the various chronobiological cycles happening in the body (Klein,

2007).

In the world of rehabilitation, different types of slow-motion practice or standstill can be found in

traditions like Feldenkrais (Feldenkrais, 1972), the Alexander Technique (Barlow, 1975), Release

Technique (Johnson, 1995) and Kinetic Awareness (Saltonstall, 1988). These tools accommodate a

deeper awareness or recovery from misalignments or injuries in the body, often through standstill

and a focus on breathing. Similar approaches may be found in different versions of yoga and other

physical meditation techniques.

Body – space

To understand the concept of standstill and micromotion better, I teamed up with dancer-

choreographer Kari Anne Vadstensvik Bjerkestrand, who has extensive experience working with

different types of slow motion practices. Together we carried out a small study in which we would

explore micromotion through the act of standing still in silence for ten minutes at a time. This

seemed like a good duration to work with, since ten minutes is a sufficient amount of time to get into

the state of standing still, while at the same time being manageable from a practical point of view.

Together we carried out fifteen standstill sessions, each ten minutes long. The sessions were done in

silence, since we wanted to explore the body and its motion in space before eventually moving to

investigating the influence of sound on our motion. The data collection was done using a full-body

motion capture set-up of the two of us using a high-quality system from Qualisys (Oqus 300) and

also recording regular video as a reference track. Each of the sessions was followed by the recording

of qualitative data in the form of notes of our subjective experience of standing still.

Spatial distribution

As we presented in Jensenius and Bjerkestrand (2012) and has been reported also in other studies of

the ‘human pendulum’ (Collins & De Luca, 1994), we easily experienced how our swaying, shifting

of weight, breathing and heart beating influenced our micromotion when standing still. This

micromotion was also easily picked up by the motion capture system. To give an impression of what

the data looks like, Figure 3.1 shows a plot of the head marker of one person’s motion capture data.

The two-dimensional plot in the figure can be seen as displaying a person’s motion pattern from

above, with the nose pointing upwards in the image. This plot shows that there is more motion in the

Y plane than in the X plane, which is to be expected since the feet stabilise the sideways motion

better than the front-to-back motion. There is much less motion happening on the Z axis (up–down)

than on the two other axes. This is also as expected, since a person standing still will not move very

4

much up and down, although one may often find that a person will either tend to straighten up their

back (increase height) or ‘fall’ together (decrease height) over time while standing still.

Figure 3.1: Example plots of the X (sideways), Y (front-back) and Z (up-down) axes of the

normalised position of a head marker. The grey line is the raw data; the black line results from a ten-

second smoothing filter; and the red line shows the linear regression (the trend) of the data set.

Temporal levels

From the motion capture data we were also able to identify different temporal levels of motion.

Adhering to the micro-meso-macro convention for the spatial levels mentioned in the introduction,

we ended up with a similar three-level description of the observed motion in time:

Micro: quasi-random motion happening on the scale of milliseconds. This may be caused by

tiny adjustments happening throughout the joints to keep the body in balance.

Meso: periodic motion at intervals of approximately five seconds, which most likely

corresponds to respiratory patterns.

Macro: ‘spikes’ or large-form changes every two to three minutes that can probably be

explained by postural adjustments, or periodically larger inhalations.

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Several studies have shown a 2 Hz resonance peak in human motion. For example, MacDougall and

Moore (2005) found that the vertical acceleration of the head in everyday motion exhibits peaks at 2

Hz, independent of gender, age, height, weight or body mass index. A classic study on human

locomotion showed that the preferred walking tempo is 120 steps per minute (2 Hz) (Murray,

Drought & Kory, 1964), and other studies have shown that the sustained control of a person’s

position may be most efficient when carried out as a series of ballistic trajectories at a rate of 2 Hz

(Loram et al., 2011). These findings correspond well with studies on the perception of musical

rhythm, which suggest that there is a preference for musical tempi of 120–125 beats per minute

(bpm) (Moelants, 2002), while the preferred tempo of dance music is a little faster (125–130 bpm)

(Moelants, 2008). We were therefore curious as to whether we would find evidence of a similar 2 Hz

resonance in our standstill data. As for now, however, we have not been able to find any particular

resonance at this frequency.

Quantity of Motion

Starting out with the standstill study, we wondered about how it would feel to stand still for ten

minutes at a time, and whether we would experience fatigue or boredom. It was interesting to find

that it was in fact very easy to stand still for such a period of time. It most of the times felt relaxing

and was at times even exciting. Furthermore, and contrary to our expectations, we did not find any

difference in the level of standstill throughout the sessions. The plots of the cumulative distance

travelled are virtually linear, and the calculated slopes of the first derivative are close to 0 for all

recordings. Neither could we find any difference in the standstill level based on whether we stood

still for 5, 10 or 15 minutes. The level and shape of motion was remarkably consistent throughout all

of the recordings, which may indicate that each of us has a certain level of standstill in our bodies

that it is difficult to alter.

Based on the positive, interesting and, partly, surprising findings from the pilot study, we did a

follow-up study, Sverm 2, in which we were joined by violinist-researcher Victoria Johnson for a

year-long study of standstill and micromotion. The methodological approach was the same as for the

first project: ten-minute long standstill sessions, each being motion captured, video recorded and

discussed in the group (see Jensenius et al., 2014, for details). The main difference from the first

study was that we used only one, individual motion capture marker per person. In the Sverm 1

recordings we used a full-body motion capture set-up, with markers placed on all the main joints. For

the analysis of the Sverm 1 data, however, we mainly focused on a marker placed on the neck, and

this turned out to reveal quite a lot of the motion in the body. For Sverm 2 we therefore decided to

use only one marker on the head of each person, the most extreme part of the ‘swinging body’. Using

only one marker per person simplified the set-up, both practically and conceptually, and still

provided sufficient amounts of data for analysis.

One of the aims of Sverm 2 was to quantify the level of micromotion happening when standing still

in silence, so that this base level could later be used to find how music influenced the standstill. Here

we decided to calculate the ‘quantity of motion’ (QoM) of each motion capture marker by summing

up all the differences of consecutive samples for the magnitude of its position vector – that is, the

first derivative of the position:

𝑄𝑜𝑀 =1

𝑇∑ ||𝒑(𝑛) − 𝒑(𝑛 − 1)||

𝑁

𝑛=2

where p is the XYZ position vector of a marker, N is the total number of samples and T is the total

duration of the recording. The resultant QoM is measured in millimetres per second (mm/s) and this

is the feature and unit that will be used in the rest of this chapter.

Analysing 38 such ten-minute long standstill recordings showed that the individual average values

for the three of us were 5.2 mm/s (SD = 1.1 mm/s), 6.4 mm/s (SD = 1.1 mm/s), and 7.3 mm/s (SD =

0.9 mm/s), respectively (Jensenius et al., 2014). The low standard deviations indicate that the results

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were very consistent over time, particularly considering that the recordings were done over several

months, at different times of the day and with varying physical and mental tasks performed during

the sessions. Also interesting was that we did not get any ‘better’ at standing still over time. One

could have thought that we would improve our results with practice, but the findings indicate that

each person may have a specific level of standstill that it is difficult to alter.

Physical and spatial factors influencing micromotion

During the sessions we experimented with different physical and mental strategies to see whether

they would have an effect on both the measurable and perceivable level of standstill. The most

influential factors turned out to be:

Eyes. Keeping the eyes open stabilises the body more than closing the eyes. In fact, recordings

with the eyes shut would usually lead to a 1 mm/s higher average QoM.

Knees. Locking the knees leads to lower average QoM values, as it stabilises the legs more than

if the knees are open.

Arms. Letting the arms hang straight down is the most comfortable and efficient way of

standing still. Closing the arms in front of the chest may work for some, but stabilises the body

less than letting them hang and may also be uncomfortable over time.

Feet. The most stable position is to stand with the feet facing forwards and at a shoulder-width’s

distance. We tried many different feet positions and some of them (particularly the

asymmetrical ones) made it virtually impossible to stand still for an entire ten-minute session.

In addition to testing out various types of physical strategies, we also tried to employ different

mental tasks while standing still, including employing various meditation techniques, playing mental

number games, imagining motion within the body and so on. We also explored how standing in

various part of the lab space would influence the experience, such as standing in the middle of the

room, close to a wall, and close/far from each other. Interestingly, we have not been able to find any

measurable differences in the quantity of motion from these tests. However, while the tasks and

physical changes did not influence our level of standstill, these changes did have a major impact on

each individual’s experience of standing still, for better and for worse. Carrying out a mental

exercise, for example, was a very different experience than just letting the thoughts wonder.

It was particularly interesting to find that the placement within the room had such an impact on the

experience of standing still, even though it did not lead to any measurable differences. For example,

the experience of standing next to a wall was clearly different from standing in the middle of the

room, even when the eyes were closed. This may to a large part be based on aural differences; after

all, it is easy to hear that you are standing next to a wall based on the perception of the room

acoustics. But also the visual component might have had an effect, since standing closer to a wall felt

like we were ‘leaning’ towards that wall. This knowledge about the importance of the position in

space later turned out to be useful when developing the final performances of the Sverm project.

Sound – body

After having explored micromotion in a smaller group and over a longer period of time, we became

interested in checking the validity of our findings with a larger group of people. This led to a study

‘camouflaged’ as the Norwegian Championship of Standstill. We had previously experienced that it

was challenging to get volunteers for standing still in the lab, but adding a competitive element on a

day with many visitors on campus turned out to be an efficient way of getting a fairly large group of

people to participate. There are reports on other standstill competitions in which the aim is to stand

still for a very long time (apparently up to 30 hours). We were more interested in studying the level

and quality of the standstill and also the effect of music on people’s micromotion.

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Procedure

A little more than 100 participants were recruited to the study, and they took part in groups from 5-

12 participants at a time. Not everyone completed the task and there were some missing/erroneous

marker data, so the final dataset consisted of 77 participants, 42 male and 35 female, with an average

age of 27 years (min=16, max=67). The participants filled out a questionnaire in which they

indicated the number of hours per week spent on different music or motion-related activities:

Listen to music: M = 19 hours per week (SD = 15 hours)

Play/produce/compose music: M = 8 hours per week (SD = 8 hours)

Dance: M = 2 hours per week (SD = 2 hours)

Training/motion: M= 4 hours per week (SD = 4 hours)

The high standard deviations are due to the fact that about half of the participants were music

students and professionals spending a lot of time on musical activities, while the other half had

relatively little musical activity.

The task given to the participants was to stand still on the floor for six minutes in total, three minutes

in silence and three minutes with music. The experiment was presented as a ‘championship’ of

standstill, with an iPod Nano as the first prize. The participants knew that they were part of a

research project, but they did not know anything else about the content of the study. They were free

to choose their standing position.

The musical stimuli were seven excerpts of 20–40 seconds duration, ranging from slow non-

rhythmic music (electronic and acoustic) to dance music (electronic dance music and salsa). The

motion capture data was recorded and pre-processed in Qualisys Track Manager and the analysis

was carried out in Matlab using the MoCap Toolbox (Toiviainen & Burger, 2010).

The recordings were done with a sampling rate of 100 Hz. The motion capture system was calibrated

before each recording session to ensure the highest possible accuracy and precision of the data. We

have previously shown that the spatial noise level of the system is much lower than that of a person

standing still (Jensenius et al., 2012), and this we also checked by recording the position of a marker

placed on a pole standing in the middle of the capture space throughout all the recordings.

Results

In the Sverm project we had found QoM values in the range of 5–7 mm/s for the participants, but

this was for only a few people. We were therefore eager to see if we would find a similar QoM level

for a larger group of people.

As summarised in Table 3.1, we found an average QoM of 6.5 mm/s (SD = 1.6 mm/s) for the entire

data set. The best result was 3.9 mm/s (the winner) and the poorest 13.7 mm/s. These values,

however, included both the no-music and music conditions, so Table 3.1 also shows a breakdown of

the values in these two conditions, as well as for each of the individual music tracks (parts 2–8).

Table 3.1: Average QoM values for the entire session, no-music and music conditions, and for each

of the individual parts.

No music (3 min) Music excerpts (3 min)

Part 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

Mean values (mm/s) 6.5

Mean values (mm/s) 6.3 6.6

Mean values (mm/s) 6.3 6.2 6.5 6.7 6.5 6.6 6.9 6.7

Standard deviation

(mm/s)

1.4 1.8 1.9 1.9 1.7 1.8 3.8 2.3

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On average, participants moved slightly more to the 3-minute part with music (M = 6.6 mm/s, SD =

1.9 mm/s) than to the 3-minute part without music (M = 6.3 mm/s, SD = 1.4 mm/s, t(76) = -2.61,

two-tailed t-test, p < 0.01). This is not a very large difference, but still shows a tendency that the

musical stimuli influenced the level of standstill. The results are even clearer when looking at results

for the individual stimuli, with relatively high QoM values for the electronic dance music excerpt

(part 7, M = 6.9 mm/s, SD = 3,8 mm/s) and for the salsa excerpt (part 8, M = 6.7 mm/s, SD = 2,3

mm/s). As such, the results confirm the idea that ‘music makes you move’. This may not be very

surprising, but it is still interesting to see that even in a competitive setting during which the

participants actively tried to stand still, the music had an influence on their micromotion. In future

studies we will also be interested in looking at the influence of the participants’ height, age, gender

and music/motion background on their QoM results.

Self-reports

From the Sverm studies, we knew that two of the most important factors when it comes to

influencing the level of standstill, is whether one is standing with eyes open or closed and with open

or locked knees. Hence the most stable position should theoretically be to stand with the eyes open

and with locked knees. We did not record any data that would allow for quantifying these two

conditions, but the participants did self-report on their strategies for eyes and knees, as summarized

in Table 3.2.

Table 3.2: Self-reported standstill conditions of the participants

Yes Both No

Eyes open? 64 8 5

Locked knees? 35 32 10

The participants were not instructed to keep their eyes open or close, but most people decided to

keep them open during the experiment. Some participants also reflected on how they used their sight,

such as:

I tried to watch a particular point all the time […]

The material does not allow for evaluating what people meant when they indicated that they had both

open and locked knees. Presumably they varied during the course of the experiment, but one person

also wrote in the free-text field of the questionnaire that:

I locked the left knee all the time, while the right was bent […]

There were also some that reported other types of physical strategies, such as:

I sucked my belly in […]

The participants were asked to self-report on how much they felt that they moved and how tiresome

it was. The values, summarised in Table 3.3, indicate that they felt it was not particularly tiresome.

Table 3.3: Self-report on experience (1=low, 5=high)

Mean SD

How tiresome? 2.6 1.0

How much motion during silence? 3.1 0.9

How much motion during music? 2.7 1.2

It is interesting to see that several of the participants wrote that they moved less during the sections

with music than during the part in silence. This clearly contradicts the idea that ‘music makes you

move’, it contradicts our QoM findings and it contradicts some of the free-text comments, such as:

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I noticed how I automatically started moving when the music started […] particularly the

hip-hop.

Another had a similar observation:

It was difficult to stand still to the ‘funky music’…

The participants were also asked to submit free-text replies on the overall experience. These were

generally positive and some people even wrote that the experience had been so pleasant that they

would start standing still for a few minutes every day.

Body – sound

The scientific outcomes and the experiential knowledge gained from the first parts of the Sverm

project led to the final part, Sverm 3, which was devoted to the development of a music/dance

performance based on and around the concept of micromotion and microsound. After having worked

analytically for several months, the group was at this stage eager to use the experiential and

theoretical knowledge in artistic practice, and particularly in a truly combined music and dance

constellation.

Spatiotemporal categories

Throughout the rehearsals it quickly became clear that we needed a common vocabulary to

systematically work with relationships between actions and sounds together in the group. Here we

ended up combining the three spatial and temporal levels mentioned earlier into a set of

spatiotemporal categories, as summarised in Table 3.4. The system is simple and is based on

separating both space and time into three levels: micro, meso, macro, as presented above. Even

though Table 3.4 refers to some specific number ranges for both space and time, these should be

thought of only as indicative. The main point of the system is that the meso level is used to describe

what would be considered ‘normal’ actions and sounds, while the micro and macro levels are used to

describe smaller/shorter or larger/longer actions and sounds, respectively. Of course, the

interpretation of these levels is highly subjective and also context-dependent. Still the descriptions

worked very well within the group, and it was also easy to introduce the system to other musicians

and dancers that we occasionally worked with.

Table 3.4: Overview of the spatiotemporal categories developed in the Sverm project (approximate

values).

Space Time

Micro < 1cm < 0.5s

Meso 1–100cm 0.5–10s

Macro > 100cm > 10s

From the spatiotemporal categories we were able to create a ‘matrix’ from which we could also

come up with combinations of the different levels. For example, a ‘micro-micro action’ would

designate an action small in both space and time, while a ‘micro-macro action’ would be an action

small in space but long in time. In rehearsals we systematically explored all such possible

combinations of small and large, short and long actions, and everyone would easily be able to

perform any type of combination spontaneously.

Microsound

While sound had been produced also for the exploration of actions, we next turned our attention to

working specifically with sound-producing actions. Here we used the same type of matrix solution to

explore different types of sounds. For example, a ‘micro-micro sound’ would be soft in loudness and

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short in time, while a ‘macro-micro sound’ would be very loud but short. Again, these categories are

highly subjective and context-dependent, but the system still worked very well in a rehearsal context

in which it was necessary to try out a number of things in rapid succession.

We found it particularly rewarding to systematically explore combinations of sounds and actions.

From nature we are used to a clear causality between actions and sounds, in which the nature and

quality of a sound is directly related to its sound-producing action (cf. Windsor, this volume). Since

we were working between dance and music, we wanted to explore the two by ‘splitting up’ a sound-

producing action into two parts: the action and the following sound. In that way a dancer could

perform a ‘sound-producing action’, such as hitting in the air, which was then ‘sonified’ by a

musician, for example through a vocal expression from the singer or violin sound from the violinist

(see picture from a rehearsal in Figure 3.2). This we did using the above-mentioned matrix, testing

connections between short/long and small/large actions followed by short/long and low/loud sounds.

At first it appeared mainly as a miming game between the dancers and musicians, with some funny

‘mickey mousing’ effects in between. After getting used to this type of sonic interplay, however, we

reached a level at which lots of interesting perceptual ‘conflicts’ were exposed, for example

combinations of large/short actions followed by low/long sounds. Such combinations in some ways

feel ‘wrong’, but many of them turned out to be aesthetically interesting, and some of them we also

developed into parts of the final performance.

Figure 3.2: Two dancers and two musicians rehearsing relationships between actions and sounds at

different levels.

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Microinteraction

The above-mentioned exploration of ‘unnatural’ couplings between actions and sounds were

performed acoustically by the dancers and musicians. Following from this we also developed a live

electronics parts, through what we have called ‘microinteraction’ (Jensenius, 2017). Here we used

the motion capture system (Qualisys Oqus 300) in realtime mode, tracking each of the performers in

space. The data was sent to an OSC-controlled sound synthesis system and a DMX-controlled

lighting system, for further electronic exploration.

For the sonic interaction we played with a number of different mapping modes, ranging from the

direct mapping of marker data to sine tones to granular synthesis playback of pre-recorded sounds.

The lighting was also explored fully, from motorised control of light sources based on positioning on

the floor to colour transformations based on motion patterns. The perhaps most interesting finding

from these explorations was how the microinteraction worked as a ‘microscope’, expanding the

micromotion of the performers into large-scale sound and light effects in the performance space.

This was also something that would have a major impact on the final performance.

Putting it all together in performance

The Sverm project and its various forked sub-projects culminated in a series of 45-minute long

evening performances focused on ‘a micro universe of dance and music’. The performance was built

up of seven ‘pieces’ that in various ways explored the concept of standstill, micromotion and

microsound. Being a minimalist project in nature, each of the ‘pieces’ explored only one or a few

key concepts, and each of them also used the live electronic sound and lighting sparsely.

The perhaps most important challenge of the entire process was to develop a performance setting in

which an audience could have a meaningful experience of watching the standstill of others. After all,

to fully be able to explore the richness of such a ‘micro-performance’ requires some attentiveness

and concentration. Through various workshop presentations and small-scale testing we found that it

was necessary to start each performance with the audience members standing still themselves for a

few minutes. That way they would ‘calm’ down, get to experience their own breathing and

micromotion, and relax into a state from which they could enjoy the micromotion of the performers.

So each of the performances started with the audience members coming into the space and being

instructed to stand still and listen to ambient music for five minutes before sitting down. This was a

very easy and efficient way of preparing the audiences for what would come.

From the performers' point of view, the main challenge was to learn how to turn the inwards-facing

focus of a regular standstill session into a performance context. Here it became important to

differentiate between the ‘state’ of standing still and the ‘action’ of carrying out motion at a micro-

level, such as moving the finger one centimetre over the course of ten minutes (Jensenius, 2016). At

first, it was not immediately clear whether an observer could actually spot the difference between a

state and such a microaction. From the performer’s perspective, however, it is quite different to walk

on stage with the intention of standing still for ten minutes as compared to carrying out a 10-minute

long microaction. In the end it also turned out that the focus of the performer’s intention and

attention was clearly visible to the audience.

The use of interactive lighting and sound was very subtle throughout the performances, but the

electronics still played a crucial role. The slowly moving light and colour changes helped create

transitions between the various parts of the performance, and the lighting was also the most

important visual element next to the performers’ bodies. Since the performers stood still most of the

time, the different lighting conditions helped create very different atmospheres of the performance

space itself, but it also helped in emphasising different parts of the micromotion of the performers.

The interactive sound played a similar role in creating a sonic environment ranging from the silence

of the room to fully spatialised ambient sounds. Two of the pieces also contained direct mappings

12

from micromotion to sound synthesis, during which the sound worked as the ‘motion microscope’

mentioned above.

We performed a total of eight 45-minute evening shows, which received both positive reviews and

interesting feedback from some of the audience members that were interviewed right after the shows.

One participant commented:

I didn’t know what to expect, but was curious […] at the end it felt like I had been given

a massage.

Many of the audience members commented that they had enjoyed being transformed into ‘another

time and space’. As such, we succeeded in what we aimed for with the performances.

Conclusions

Summing up, this chapter has presented results from a nearly two-year long exploration of human

micromotion in the project Sverm. Combining scientific and artistic aims and methods, I worked

together with a group of musicians and dancers to gain both experiential knowledge of the

phenomenon of micromotion in music and dance but also to develop a conceptual model for using

this knowledge in artistic practice.

We found that most people move their head at around 6.5 mm/s when standing still for sustained

periods of time, and that this level is consistent over individual standstill sessions but also across

different sessions. Results from the ‘Norwegian Championship of Standstill’ confirmed that music

can affect our micromotion, even though the differences are small. This was only a pilot study,

however, so more systematic studies are needed to investigate more closely how (much) music

influences micromotion. Here it will also be interesting to more closely study bow people’s

background influence their results, and also how different musical features (rhythm, melody,

loudness, spatialisation etc.) come into play.

In addition to learning more about the effects of music-induced micromotion, it will be interesting to

continue exploring the field of musical microinteraction in artistic practice. We have already seen

that this level of interaction may open up for entirely new performance techniques, many of which

give us a quite different way of exploring body, space and sound in music and dance performances.

Acknowledgements

The Sverm project was supported by the Arts Council Norway, Norwegian Research Council,

University of Oslo and Norwegian Academy of Music.

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